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Accessibility

Central Gateshead Medical Group believes that this site should be accessible to everyone. The core of this site is made up of Featured Articles that have been developed to be compliant with World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Guidelines, and meet all points required to become a Double-A Conformant site. Some content is provided by third parties and where they not yet fully conformant they are published and publicly accessible but not featured.

Access keys are keyboard shortcuts which allow a different form of navigation.

PC Users: The 'Alt' key must be held down and the corresponding access key pressed to navigate you to the page.

MAC Users: The 'Control' key must be held down and the corresponding access key pressed to navigate you to the page.

Text Resizing

Some websites still feature text resizing options, however all modern browsers have this feature built in. If you learn how to do this in your browser, rather than with the tools specific to the websites you visit, you will be able to resize text for all the websites you visit. What follows is a summary of how to adjust text size in the most popular web browsers.

If you find it difficult to read some text when viewing a web site then you can resize the text to suit you. By default web browsers - for example Internet Explorer and Firefox - do not make it obvious that you can do this.

Using Internet Explorer (IE) you can change the font size by selecting the View menu item and then selecting the Text Size option - you have 5 size settings to pick from. Once you select this setting, it is remembered for all web sites that you visit.

A better option is to place a text resize control permanently on your toolbar. To do this, press your right mouse button on the toolbar area to bring up the contextual menu and choose 'Customize'. A list of available toolbar buttons appears on the left. Scroll down to the Text icon and then select 'Add'. You can also change the display of the icons while you're here, just in case you find the toolbar icons a little small too. Once you hit the close button, you'll see a Text Size control there, making it much easier to change the size.

If you are using IE 7 or IE 8, the process is much the same - right click on the toolbar, but you need to select 'Customize Command Bar' then 'Add or Remove Commands'.

In Firefox, you can increase the font size in a similar way to Internet Explorer. Unlike IE, you are not limited to 5 sizes (that being two notches up and two notches down from the default).

Unfortunately Firefox does not provide a toolbar icon for text resizing, even if you choose to customise. However, Patrick Lauke from the University of Salford has created an extension that creates a set of buttons that you can add to your toolbar. Simply go to the Firefox Extensions page and search for the 'Text Size Toolbar', or go to tinyurl.com/2ztudx. Once you've installed the extension and restarted Firefox, right click on your toolbar and choose customise. There you will find the resize buttons which you can drag and drop on to your toolbar.

There are other ways that you can change text size on a web page. If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, simply hold down the CTRL key - or the command key if you are a Mac user - and move the scroll wheel up and down. For Firefox users, hold down the CTRL key and press the plus (+) and minus (-) keys. Finally, if you are using Internet Explorer 7, you can hold down the CTRL key and press the plus or minus keys which will zoom the whole page in and out of view.